Legalizing and Advancing Psychoanalytic Academic Research

The Southern California Psychoanalytic Institute (SCPI) currently is, in the words of Melvin Mandel, “an aggressive advocate of non-medical training.” A delicious historical irony is that it was founded in 1950 as the “Institute for Psychoanalytic Medicine of Southern California.

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Under the chairmanships of two directors of vision, Sigmund Gabe, 1964-1969, and Samuel Eisenstein, 1969-1977, the SCPI initiated its academic research training program. Now the Institute has one of the most successful psychoanalytic academic research training programs in the country to bring clinical training in psychoanalysis to university teachers and researchers. Over the past 35 years, 36 academic researchers from the University of California at Los Angeles, Irvine, and Riverside; the University of Southern California; Caltech; and the California State Universities have completed or are currently in psychoanalytic training at SCPI.

A crucial feature in setting the supportive tone of SCPI training is the material assistance offered to candidates by the Eisenstein-Gabe Research Training Fellowship Fund. The person most responsible for shaping and ensuring the stability and success of the SCPI research training program was Sam Eisenstein. He had the idea, unprecedented in American psychoanalysis, of a Research Training Fellowship to help young academics to pay for their training analysis. Sam appointed a committee of Norman Tabachnick, Judd Marmor, and myself to set up the Fellowship. He then followed through vigorously, year after year pushing the often ambivalent membership to vote to renew the $10,000 three-year stipend so another university-based researcher could be trained in psychoanalysis.

When there is a person who shows unusual strength of character and leadership in a cause, we like, as analysts, to ask where this determination came from. I did not know Sam’s parents or his Rumanian childhood home. Clearly, his humanistic European education and first analysis in Italy were significant. My psychodynamic speculation is that he who has survived the Holocaust by escaping from an Italian concentration camp and leading a party through the Abruzzi to the Allied lines, is not afraid to meet the criticism of medical members who confront him with the challenge: “What’re you doing with our Institute and our money?”

In its classes, teaching, and programs, which for each of the last 35 years have usually included one or two academics, the SCPI realized Freud’s fantasy of 1926:

If—which may sound fantastic to-day—one had to found a college of psycho-analysis, … analytic instruction would include branches of knowledge which are remote from medicine and which the doctor does not come across in his practice: the history of civilization, mythology, the psychology of religion and the science of literature. Unless he is well at home in these subjects, an analyst can make nothing of a large amount of his material.

In building research psychoanalysis, transgressions were committed in the spirit of Freud’s admonition to Oskar Pfister that to be an analyst

one must become a bad character, disregard the rules, sacrifice oneself, betray, behave like an artist who buys paints with his wife’s household money or burns the furniture to heat the studio for his model. Without such a bit of criminality there is no real achievement.

A problem appeared early with the legal legitimization of the clinical practice of the research students and graduates of the California Institutes. The academics were not state-licensed clinicians. Psychologists, who had long been excluded from psychoanalytic training within the American Psychoanalytic Association (“the American”), were envious. I was the first research candidate targeted in the attempt to derail academic psychoanalytic candidates from doing clinical work and to keep them from seeing patients.

Practicing without a license is a crime subject to state prosecution. The first thing I did was to visit the State Attorney General’s Office, where two young and surly Deputy Attorneys General threatened me with prosecution if I persisted in doing clinical work. Next, I secured a license as a Marriage and Family Therapist, so that I would have the cover of law. This is a broad clinical license, but it took a year and required sitting for examinations, and marriage and family therapy

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was not my identity. The visit to the Attorney General’s office brought to our attention that the most inclusive privilege in the realm of counseling belongs to the clergy. The clergy’s right to counsel and their privileged communication is absolute. While attorneys, physicians, and mental health professionals work with restrictions of confidentiality, and in some cases, such as threats of violence (under the Tarasoff decision) or child molestation, they are subject to mandated reporting, there is no such limitation on the clergyman’s and the member’s right of privacy in communication. As a law professor colleague pointed out, if the Tarasoffs had sued the Archdiocese of San Francisco rather than the Regents of the University of California, they would not have had a case.

This led a group of Research Analysts to found the Universal Life Church of Psychodynamics as a legal cover until we could get a law passed. (The “Reverend” Al Hutter of SCPI knew about a free mail-order church and had been a member since the Vietnam War.) One of our Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Society and Institute (LAPSI) lawyer analysts informed us that a church has to have officers, recorded meetings, a treasury, and stationery, so we elected officers, called our study group a meeting, and printed some stationery. My wife exclaimed, “But, Peter, you’re Jewish!” Needless to say, this maneuver did not amuse the Institutes. We got prickly phone calls along the lines of “What in the hell do you guys think you are doing?” A happy consequence of Universal Life Church (ULC) minister status is that it confers in the eyes of the state the right to officiate at funerals and marriages. In the last quarter century I have, as a ULC minister, officiated at one funeral at Forest Lawn Memorial Park, which was a study in the American social mores of death, and at several weddings of close friends and family members.

Balzac said that all great fortunes are founded on a great crime. What I have related was neither a great crime nor, regrettably, was the outcome a great fortune. I think the Universal Life Church of Psychodynamics was a transgression in Freud’s sense of the need for “a bit of criminality,” not because it was illegal—it was explicitly very legal, but because it misused religion as a desperate front to cover the right to clinical practice. Let us say it was our adolescent experiment with boundaries and transgressions as analysts. Perhaps this is a further case of the principle that if you have unreasonable or onerous laws, people will find ways around them. Nevertheless, we kept the church and we got the law.

Our legislation was sponsored by Howard Berman, the California State Assembly Majority Leader (now a U.S. Congressman), who represented the district of UCLA. The Institute set up a Legislative Committee under my chairmanship. I worked closely with Martin Levine, a LAPSI research candidate and a professor of law at USC. His legal-drafting skills were indispensable in working with the state’s Legislative Counsel in writing the law around the objections of the psychology lobby. The most important lobby we had on our side was the University of California Student Lobby representing the 130,000 students of the UC system and their extended families. The Student Lobby reaches alumni and voting sympathizers who are far more numerous than the students. Most UC students have parents and grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins, nieces and nephews, and family friends who can be mobilized to vote on student issues in every legislative district in the state. The Student Lobby argued with great understanding of the nature of academic psychoanalytic training and practice and of what was at stake for students of the university:

[The legislation will] allow these … professors to maintain a working knowledge of the actual practice of psychoanalysis by authorizing them to engage in psychoanalysis. (Most of these professors teach the application of psychoanalysis in the study of such academic disciplines as history, law, medicine, political science, and humanities. In the course of their teachings they also provide some instruction in the practice of psychoanalysis as it relates to the class’s subject matter.) If these professors are not allowed to actually engage in the practice of psychoanalysis on a routine basis, their instruction will consist entirely of theoretical knowledge with no solid foundation in practice.

During 1976 and 1977 the California institutes of the American fought the state bureaucracy, which opposed us and the psychology institutes through numerous drafting conferences and protracted legislative hearings. The powerful and well-connected psychology lobby fought us at each hearing.

When it came to getting our bill through the Assembly, the Senate, and the Governor, the adage of former U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Tip O’Neill that “all politics is local poli-

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tics” was abundantly demonstrated. Assemblyman Art Agnew (now Congressman) of San Francisco, a key man in the Public Health Committee, asked us, “Where do you stand on gays? That is one constituency I cannot cross.” I recall SCPI President Lenny Comess assuring him, “Oh, we have lots of gay members.” Agnew moved the adoption of the bill in the Public Health Committee. Our legislation was carried in the Senate by its doyen, Senator Walter Stiern, whom I had known as my veterinarian in Bakersfield. Dr. Stiern said to me, “Write me a letter explaining what psychoanalysis is and why this is a good bill.” He secured unanimous passage.

After passage in the Assembly and Senate we needed a contact who had the ear of Governor Jerry Brown because he was regarded as unsympathetic to psychoanalysis and organized medicine. He practiced Zen, favored alternative medicine, and appointed “New Age” psychologists to the California Medical Board. He took a “Caveat emptor!” approach to licensing—he did not believe in it. He thought the public should be offered an unrestricted choice of everything. Until the last minute we did not know whether he would sign the bill into law.

Our man in the Governor’s Office was Leroy Chatfield, whom I had known in Bakersfield as Brother Gilbert, the Vice Principal of Garces Memorial (Roman Catholic) High School when we worked together for Cesar Chavez on the United Farm Workers’ strike and grape boycott (I gave guest presentations on psychoanalysis to his classes). He lived with me in my bachelor pad while organizing the grape boycott in Los Angeles. We organized the “Professors for Farm Labor” which UCLA faculty and staff could join for $10. Now, having been freed by the Vatican from his vows, he was in the Governor’s Office as an advisor on farm labor. When I called Leroy, explained the bill, and asked him to talk to Jerry Brown, he said, “Of course I will. This sounds like a wonderful idea!”

On September 30, 1977, Governor Brown signed the first Research Psychoanalyst Law, which is also the first time in the history of any jurisdiction that psychoanalysis was legitimated by a state. The new law explicitly named the four California Institutes in the American (Southern California, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and San Diego) as authorized to train psychoanalysts for “teaching, training, or research.” Graduates were entitled to call themselves “psychoanalysts” and to engage in psychoanalysis. The regulations of the law set the institutional academic standard of teaching and research affiliation as “the University of California or equivalent” and the Principles and Standards for Education in Psychoanalysis of the American Psychoanalytic Association as the California standard for psychoanalytic training. When, after protracted hearings the bill became law, Assembly Majority Leader Berman said to us:

The people of the state through their legislature and Governor have carefully investigated and weighed the quality of your training and the ethics of your practice and found it of such a high standard of excellence that we are granting you a privilege that we do not grant to the graduates of our own law schools and medical schools—to practice your profession without any further state examination or scrutiny. The standards of your institutes alone satisfy us.

Upon the passage of the law, Anna Freud wrote, “I think this legal decision is a wonderful thing and will mark an important development in the history of psychoanalysis in America.”

I am impressed by how in our political system a small group of neither rich nor influential citizens could seek and successfully obtain hearing and redress on a complex legal issue. It is another historical irony that these psychology institutes who fought us so hard are now part of the International Psychoanalytic Association and enthusiastically take advantage of the California Research Psychoanalyst Law.

The integration of psychoanalysis with another field is a complex matter. “The psycho-analytic mode of thought,” said Freud, “acts like a new instrument of research.” Each discipline has its own thought styles, historically conditioned coded language, research traditions, shared cognitive assumptions, canons of evidence, and ways of perceiving the world, just as a clinical socialization in medicine, psychology, or social work does. As Freud conceived it, the work of psychoanalysis is a work of interpretation and translation: “The interpretations made by psycho-analysis are first and foremost translations from an alien method of expression into the one familiar to us. When we interpret a dream we are simply translating a particular thought-content (the latent dream thoughts) from the ‘language of dreams’ into our waking speech.” Much of the academic’s most creative and fruitful work is the translation of the unique

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understandings of the unconscious from the esoteric language and concepts of psychoanalysis into their application, comprehensibility and utility, in the discourse and registers of other fields. This requires of the researcher expertise in both fields.

The professional and institutional problems of academic research graduates are different from those of purely clinical psychoanalysts because they have come to psychoanalysis from the social sciences and humanistic disciplines and have had their professional socialization in those frames of reference, concepts, and teaching and research agendas. Their point of entry into institutionalized psychoanalysis follows a socialization process shaped by a graduate school apprenticeship and a university career marked by frequent peer review in disciplines whose empirical imperatives set the rigorous standards for competitive external grants and for the ascending of university promotion ladders. The academic researcher’s task of the integration of clinical psychodynamics with their teaching and research is exceptional in an institute seminar class where most of the members are clinicians.

The academic researcher’s integration of clinical psychodynamics with a university career is a different alloy from the metal of most psychoanalysts because the researchers who come to psychoanalysis from the social sciences and humanities must integrate elements from two disparate worlds. If they wish to remain active and relevant in their academic discipline, psychoanalytic researchers must continue to address worldwide audiences of colleagues and elite networks of peers whose attitudes to psychoanalysis range from skeptical to downright hostile.

The University of California Interdisciplinary Psychoanalytic Consortium (UCIPC) was founded in 1991 by Professors Nancy Chodorow (Sociology), Peter Loewenberg (History), and Robert Nemiroff (Psychiatry) to discuss both our work as psychoanalytic teachers and researchers and our problems as psychoanalysts in medicine, the liberal arts, humanities, and social sciences in the university. The Stoller Foundation was created to honor the psychoanalytic research and teaching of a UCLA psychoanalyst colleague who worked to foster interdisciplinary cross-fertilization on our campus and who was multi-disciplinary in his research. The Foundation sponsors the annual Robert Stoller Memorial lecture at UCLA, now in its 10th year; has a research grant program; gives two Stoller Scholarships and other support for graduate students to attend the UCIPC meetings; and has sponsored a mentoring program for academics to consult with analysts on their research.

The Southern California Psychoanalytic Institute research academic training program has a couple of limitations. We have not developed the full potential of “partial” or non-clinical training. We concluded that a merely academic and cultural understanding of psychoanalysis—without the clinical basis upon which its most groundbreaking discoveries originate and from which its mutative potential emerges—runs the risk of becoming an empty abstraction and another interpretive game. The objective of academic research training in psychoanalysis is to facilitate the crucial component of clinical training and practice to academic scholars while enriching the language and interpretive powers of psychoanalysis by building bridges to other disciplines.

We could well re-open and re-explore the potential of partial training. Academics often are reluctant to enter full training because of the time, energy, and money demands, which they find incompatible with an academic career judged on “productivity.” Our Institute regularly receives requests for partial training from medical specialists, particularly internists, gastroenterologists, and pediatricians. Now these applications are rejected. Yet if our purpose is the dissemination of psychoanalytic knowledge and perspectives, we need to take another look at our “all or none” position on partial training of academics as well as medical specialists.

A major effort needs to be made to enlarge the pools of psychoanalysts in academia and to lower the average age of analysts which, according to a recent announcement on the American’s member’s list, is 63 years. Bringing in younger people would help to counter the prevailing superannuation in the age profile of the American and of the psychoanalytic profession generally. An important limitation in bringing younger people into the field has been the PhD barrier. Whereas the American Psychoanalytic Association now trains mental health professionals who do not hold doctorates, in the academic field we still insist on a doctorate and a tenure-track university position. The idea of starting psychoanalytic training earlier, of accepting, as the current Principles and Standards puts it, “post-masters graduate students of unusual potential who have not yet attained the highest degree in their area of specialization,” is an established one, and is eminently rational. We need to welcome

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new and younger analysts who integrate the humanities, the social sciences, and psychoanalysis, through scholarly work and university teaching.

There is an optimal time in a life to introduce psychoanalysis. If missed, it can often never be recovered. By the time tenure is reached, academics have a decade or more of scholarly training and productivity behind them. They are well embarked on, perhaps even entrenched in, a research model, and the chance to fundamentally influence their thinking in a psychoanalytic direction may come too late. The solution is to make psychoanalytic education available to outstanding graduate students at the opportune time in their graduate training. This is the most open and inviting way to get scholars engaged with psychoanalysis, which is also vital for the survival and future of psychoanalysis.

The graduate years are in many respects the ideal period in which to undergo psychoanalytic training. Although grad students do not realize it, they will never again have so much disposable time for reading, discourse, study, and analysis. Graduate students are adults, often married and with children, who are resident in a university setting for six to ten years. They generally have strong egos; they have already passed rigorous competitive testing and screening processes; they are intellectually keen and have inquiring minds; they are in the throes of regressive transferences to professors, institutions, and ideas on which their future depends. In graduate school the research commitments and tools of a lifetime are forged and an entire career of scholarship is shaped. It makes much more sense in terms of future potential contribution to psychoanalysis and the relationship between the humanities, the social sciences, and psychoanalysis, to support a graduate student with demonstrable potential, than it does to try to recruit a scholar who is well along a career trajectory dedicated to other research methods. Given the realities of identity formation and of academic career ladders, we have been giving up the opportunity to capture future contributors by waiting until they are already established and accomplished, by which time they have, by definition, developed other kinds of expertise and commitments.

If we wish to train graduate students in psychoanalysis, we should not underestimate the subjective and objective obstacles, which transcend those of finding the appropriate candidates. The three main motivational difficulties in implementing the Committee on Research and Special Training (CORST) mandate to train graduate students are that there is no status advantage in graduate school, financing is difficult, and psychoanalytic clinical work is wrongly seen as a trade school activity. Let us examine these in sequence.

Because the psychoanalytic method and training is not perceived as a “marketable” asset in the competitive, anxiety-filled struggle for academic placement, the best we can presently do is to move it from a negative to a neutral valence. In terms of finances, psychoanalytic training for young academics requires funding, a tuition waiver, and a very low-fee training analysis. Those who see psychoanalytic clinical education as a type of technical trade school activity have missed the profound revolutionary culture critical stance of psychoanalysis now found in the humanities and social sciences. Psychoanalysis has no place in the curriculum of most psychoanalytic institutes as a culture critique of received unconscious attitudes toward sexuality, childhood, bisexuality, homosexuality, love, marriage, morality, the body, intimacy, violence and aggression, crime and a sociality, including Freud’s early cultural critical papers on bourgeois love and sexual morality. Freud’s case histories are now taught more in university humanities classes rather than in departments of psychology or psychiatry. A computer search of Harvard’s catalogues for class descriptions mentioning either Freud or psychoanalysis turned up 42 courses—all of them in the humanities.

Though many of us have had graduate students as analysands, we have also had graduate students who were ready for psychoanalytic training but were ineligible for it because they did not yet have their doctorate. We need to allow, encourage, and help fund the analytic training of talented graduate students with a strong interest in psychoanalysis. The benefit to the American would be that by training nascent academics ready to burst forth with their first publications and teaching we would be investing in decades of psychoanalytic research and teaching careers which will affect thousands of university students and colleagues—a truly influential multiplier effect for each young academic trained. This initiative is critical in carrying psychoanalysis to academia and in injecting vigor, vitality, and intellectual excitement to our discourse.

The project of introducing psychoanalytic perspectives into the academy has not taken the contours we envisioned 30 years ago. Then the

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idea was to introduce a psychoanalytic curriculum into the university. The initial efforts were a superficial interface between the templates of clinical psychoanalysis and the academic fields, with readings from the psychoanalytical canon rigidly applied to the humanities and social sciences. A typical course syllabus would take a piece of psychoanalytic theory, for example, the psychodynamics of guilt elaborated in Freud’s “Wrecked by Success,” give a clinical case, and then apply the model to a cultural or political figure such as Richard Nixon or Bill Clinton. Contemporary university practice has an academic who is also a fully trained analyst who sees texts, events, configurations, and behaviors, with a psychoanalytical frame of reference as a deeply imbedded matter of course, rather than consciously “applying” clinical models. In the psychoanalytically trained researcher, psychodynamic thinking is integral from the beginning of the research, from the moment the subjectivity of the researcher-teacher initially encounters the source material. Psychoanalytic thinking is blended as a frame of meaning among many others and interpenetrated as the data is prepared for presentation in lecture or publication.

If I may use the example of my current course in 19th-century European history, the psychoanalysis is implicit and imbedded in the framing of the problems, the Problemstellungen of the course, rather than explicitly foregrounded. The biographies presented, of leading figures such as Stendhal (Henri Beyle), Charles Darwin, William E. Gladstone, Florence Nightingale, and Joseph Conrad, are psychodynamic because they include factors such as early mother loss, sadomasochistic fantasies, primal scene, homoerotism, and projective guilt, in the narrative 19th-century cultural context. The recent winter term final examination included the question:

Europe diplomatically and militarily prepared for war from 1879 to 1914, yet her people and her leaders had no idea of where they were headed. Many Europeans spoke of peace and the solidarity of peoples rather than the solidarity of a people. How do you explain this internationalism and the enthusiasm for war in 1914?

The concepts of unconscious fantasies of permanent peace, of repression, of ambivalence and denial, and the emergence in a time of anxiety of an intolerance of ambiguity and of repressed aggressive and competitive motives, are built into the question and were implicit in the course, rather than theoretically explicated. The class had been through the decision-making of the putatively anti-militarist international Socialist parties and the memoirs of political leaders who did not know how patriotic they in fact were and with what enthusiasm they would greet the war in August, 1914. The students learned how European statesmen and opinion makers talked peace and the impossibility of a war, yet were swept up in tides of nationalism both in the polity, and in themselves, of which they were unaware. Psychoanalytic assumptions are not privileged, but are equal to economic, political, and diplomatic variables in constructing the historical narrative. Psychoanalytical understandings are integrated with historical categories and sensibility rather than externally flashed.

In finance, in politics, and in academia numbers do matter. A natural spin-off of having psychoanalytic thought on campus is the generative influence of psychoanalytic perspectives taught in the classroom. UCLA has research graduates with clinical experience teaching in 10 professional schools and humanities and social science departments. We have at UCLA enough density to be worth a state law. There are now enough psychoanalytic research individuals in the university to help each other out on academic reviews and promotions. For example, I have been called by department chairs to validate the International Journal of Psychoanalysis as a respectable refereed journal.

Having psychoanalytic perspectives actively taught on campus is a generative influence demonstrated in publications, clinical referrals, and discourse with thousands of students in seminars and classrooms who would otherwise be inaccessible to psychoanalytic ideas. The support and development of the mission of academic research psychoanalysis is crucial to the future of American psychoanalysis because it is the academic psychoanalyst who is strategically poised to interpret our field to a culture that in various ways has disavowed psychoanalytic discoveries.

At a time when the clinically oriented disciplines have diminished the complexity and the creativity of the human subject through fierce biologism and reductive nosologies, the academic psychoanalyst’s training in history, the humanities, the social sciences, and other interpretive disciplines prepares him or her to contextualize the clinical experience of patients in terms larger than those traditionally available through rigid applica-

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tions of diagnostic and other clinical categories. Albert Hutter, my psychoanalytically trained literary colleague, has written:

Literature is more than a proving ground for analytic theory, just as psychoanalytic theory is designed to do more than buttress or validate particular positions in literary theory or particular kinds of literary explanation. Most psychoanalytic readings of literary texts, or characters, or biography, as well as a good deal of literary theory which relies upon partial and often unsophisticated (or uninformed) use of clinical material, have left “applied psychoanalysis” with an unfortunate legacy of partial and reductive misreadings. Most of these misreadings—by analysts and literary critics alike—occur because two very complex disciplines are used incompletely, without adequate knowledge either of literary history and explication, on the one hand, or of psychoanalytic theory and, more important, its clinical practice, on the other…. he question here is not one of training a “cultured” analyst but of integrating two closely related disciplines that both study words, images, and stories.

Freud conceived of psychoanalysis as a “general psychology” which addresses the culture at large. His vision of psychoanalysis is one that we can still live as psychoanalytic researchers and teachers in the university and make our own:

It can be applied to the history of civilization, to the science of religion and to mythology, no less than to the theory of the neuroses, without doing violence to its essential nature. What it aims at is nothing other than the uncovering of what is unconscious in mental life.

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